Indoor location-based services typically rely on prior knowledge of buildings, such as the floor plans or blueprints to accurately provide their services. However, obtaining the prior knowledge often requires the service provider to acquire floor plans of, or perform onsite surveys for, each location before making their services or applications available to the general public. Unfortunately, floor plans are often hard to obtain, typically proprietary information and/or may belong to various parties with different and sometimes competing interests, such as the building owner, the building developers, the building architect, among others.
Additionally, in many cases, such as legacy buildings or shopping centers, the floor plans may be outdated due to extensive remodeling, or may no longer exist at all. Often times the cost of obtaining the floor plan and/or onsite survey outweighs the benefit to the service provider of providing the indoor location-based services for a particular location. This can create a situation in which the service provider requires the building owner to opt-in to the program by providing the necessary information.